First Paragraph:For at least two decades now,
party membership has been declining in most liberal
democracies (Dalton and Wattenberg, 2000; Mair, 1997: 124
ff.; Mair and van Biezen, 2001). Whereas in the 1960s
roughly 13 percent of the electorate paid their dues as
members of political parties, in the 1980s this proportion
shrunk to 9 percent, and in the 1990s only 6 percent called
themselves party members (Putnam, 2002: 406). Belgium has
been n oexception to this trend. While in 1980 all Belgian
political parties combined had 615,000 members (Deschouwer,
1992; Scarrow, 2000: 89), the latest figures stand at
455,000 members (Hooghe and Stouthuysen, 2003; Noppe, 2001).
In relative terms this means that while in 1980 9.0 percent
of the electorate was a party member, this has declined to
6.2 percent in 2000.1 This downward trend might signal that
mass parties are losing ground in liberal democracies, only
to be replaced by new types of political parties (Dalton and
Wattenberg, 2000; Scarrow, 1996, 2000).

Figures and Tables:Table 1. Membership base of the
major youth organizations in Flanders
Table 2. Previous membership of the youth organization
Table 3. Age for first candidacy and first mandate
Table 4. Reasons for first candidacy at local elections
Table 5. Self-confidence after first being elected
Table 6. Satisfaction about current function

Last Paragraph:Although at this moment it
cannot be predicted what kind of strategy party
organizations will pursue, the most likely development is
that in the foreseeable future, too, they will face an
uphill battle if they want to recruit new members. The
theoretical relevance of this investigation into youth
sections, therefore, is that it lends credibility to the
claim that in the near future parties will continue to lose
members. Given the importance and the strength of youth
socialization, it is likely that feelings of partisanship
will continue to weaken if new recruits integrate into the
party system only at a later age. Furthermore, it is
extremely likely that they will do so in ever smaller
numbers. Although these findings about one specific
recruitment channel cannot fully address issues of party
transformation in general, it is clear that the dramatic
decline of youth organizations in political parties confirms
the assumption that the days of mass membership parties may
be gone forever.